The True American Tradition; W. A. Riddle

The Declaration was elevated to de facto Constitutional status. The strictures placed on power by the Founders, their careful system of checks and balances, the Bill of Rights they placed against the federal government-these began to wane as government grew. American constitutionalism gave way to majority senti ment, increasingly expressed by the central government's open-ended commitment to vague notions of "equality" and "rights" from language found in the Declaration of Inde pendence. In allowing this to happen, we have ignored the unique historical context of the Declaration, its form and function and words designed for a specific purpose, i.e., for inde pendence from Great Britain-not for the peacetime structure and aims of a consoli dated national government! Most among the very same Revolutionary generation, who fought the British Redcoats after declaring 293 "[In 1776,] the world was born again.... "

". . . [R]emember the deeds of your fathers, and by them receive guidance for the future." -American Whig Review, 1848, 1849 A mericans venerated their past and tradi tions until very recently. Indeed, our sense. of national identity is bound up with certaIn traditions and institutions stemming from the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention. America's sense that Providence had played a role in the founding also served to confer heavy presumptive validity to our national beginnings and to the original intent of ~he founders. Mere theory or the fleeting whIm of majority opinion would not sanction change to the original compact between the people of the States before the Deity. While secularization has played its part in the un dermining of American constitutionalism , even a secular constitutional republic can not lose continuity with its past, unless it be transformed. It was in Abraham Lincoln's day that Amer ican historicism suffered a telling blow. The great church denominations had already split ~orth and South before the country drew Its famed and tragic geographic line of polit ical ?i~ide. One would expect the cataclysm of CIVIl War that followed to complicate any WesleyAl~en Riddle was assistantprOfessorofhistory at the Unzted States MilitaryAcademy, West Point, New Yor.k, from 1?93 to 1996. He is currently a Salvaton Fellow wah The Heritage Foundation for the 1996-97 term and servesas boardadvisorto The Social Critic magazine,chairingitsAmerican Civility Project.

294 THE FREEMAN • MAY 1997 our independence, worked hard to give us the Constitution for the specific purpose of es tablishing a better government. Furthermore, they chose a federal republican form of gov ernment over consolidated union. In terms of function as organic law of the land, the Constitution was ratified-the Declaration was not. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has served the questionable notion of bridging the out come of the Civil War to a few words in the Declaration instead of to the Constitution, because fourscore and seven years before 1863 is 1776-not 1789! Although we cannot know all that Lincoln would have done, the historical revision has created a perceived, binding commitment to the advancement of equality at the expense of almost everything else. It was the most amazing "open-air sleight-of-hand .... The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage"-what amounted to a new Constitution. 1 The irony is that at the most basic level (especially as implemented through pure majoritarian de mocracy), true liberty is incompatible, if not altogether incompossible,with total equality.2 We have since moved away from the princi ples and practices central to the American political tradition of the Founders-"those associated with self-government by a virtuous people deliberating under God,"3 and we have embraced a contrived "tradition" in stead.

Willmoore Kendall and George Carey equate this embrace to the "derailment" of tradition and the loss of self-government: OUf Constitution ... is clearly nomocratic in character, largely concerned, that is, with pro viding rules and limits for the government through which the people express their will. Since the derailment, however, the Constitution is increasingly viewed from a teleocraticperspec tive, as an instrument designed to fulfillthe ends, commitments, or promises of the Declaration. 4 Yet the original Constitution and Bill of Rights say nothing about equality. Moreover, the "rights" of individuals (life, liberty, prop erty, safety, pursuit of happiness) until well after the Civil War Amendments, were un derstood in their relation to good government (and rights of the people) in the federalist construct.5 Indeed, the Declaration did not establish our independence, except as a bak er's dozen of new sovereignties! Even then, all thoughtful statesmen knew the endless controversies that must surround the recon ciliation of rights and the contradictory values of liberty and equality. That is why the Founders erected a deliberative framework based on a moral foundation, which empha sized the commitment to self-government,"to rule the deliberate sense of the community."

Article V of the Constitution does, however, give us the only legitimate means of changing our basic commitment: amending the Consti tution.6 We have amended our Constitution many times, but we have not amended the Pream ble, which serves as our finest statement of national purpose. The promise held out is not for a perfect union, but for one that is "more perfect." The Framers did not presume to know what a perfect Union is, but they did know something about constituting a "more perfect Union." They did not confuse means with ends. The Preamble does not mention equality, and the omission is no matter of oversight. It may be the most salient instance of the Founders' great wisdom, for the Founders were not utopians. Rather, they told us that a righteous people operating under the forms and processes established by the Constitution will see justice forth coming.7 0 1. Garry Wills,Lincoln at Gettysburg:The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 38.

2. See Erik von Kuehnelt~Leddihn, Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of our Time (Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Press, 1993). 3. Willmoore Kendall and George C. Carey, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995 [1970]),p. ix; and see WesleyAllen Riddle, TheA merican Political Tradition booklet (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1996). 4. Kendall and Carey, p. xxii.See also Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). The nomo craticlteleocratic framework is utilized in similar vein by M.E. Bradford, in Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1993). 5. Kendall and Carey, esp. chpt. IV. 6. Kendall and Carey, esp. chpt. V, quote p. 94. 7. Kendall and Carey, esp. chpt. VI, and see VII and VIII.